I apologize, I should've said "need to consider" instead of "need". The only reason I mention this is because I am the son of a doctor who aspires to follow in his footsteps ( he's not a psychiatrist) and the only professional help that benefited me was a psychiatrist who was also an expert in psychotherapy including CBT, DBT, as well as experimental treatments.
I am not yet in med school, I'm still working on my undergrad but the problem I ran into with traditional psychotherapists is that I knew more about what they were talking about than they did. This is not a delusion of grandeur, they normally admitted this fact after googling a few facts while still in the office, trying to prove me wrong and when they saw that I was right, they conceded defeat and recommended I see someone more experienced as they couldn't help me. Some of the therapists I saw are likely in therapy themselves now. I'm not a cocky or arrogant person until I'm in a room with someone who makes the mistake of looking at me as a billable hour. More often than not, I started asking questions about their qualifications and even those with a M.A. in some bullshit counseling program couldn't effectively address my concerns and questions. Instead of admitting that fact, the next 30 minutes of a typical 1 hour session was filled with them trying to feed me bullshit and I spent the last 15 refuting everything they'd said, leaving a couple of them visibly flustered. This only fed my ego and made me believe that therapy was useless and that I was justified in walking the path of self-medication.
In the end, I found a guy who was truly an expert with nearly 40 years of experience in the fields of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy and he's not even 60. He was the first person (besides my dad) able to discuss my personal diagnosis, which was Major Depressive Disorder, with a high degree of understanding and found a treatment that worked for me after working with my dad and another psychiatrist to formulate a course of action.
Without my dad, I wouldn't have lived to see 25, not because of intentional suicide, but because of efforts to self-medicate guided by judgment filled with fog invisible to me and visible only to those around me.
I'm not cured, but I was finally brought down to reality by people who truly knew more than me, and what's more, they were able unravel my finely-tuned efforts at manipulating them after this technique had worked flawlessly on every counselor and MD I'd ever been made to see as a patient. The goals of my manipulation being to get whatever prescription I wanted or to illuminate the ignorance of counselors.
The evidence of my behavior and the path of destruction I'd left in my wake was something I could no longer ignore, and from there, my perspective on life changed. I'm a more productive person now, I've regained the trust of my family, and I'm finally on the path to having a career.
This was just my experience, but the point is that it's all about finding the right person to listen and be able to advise you in a way you take seriously.
I still think you need to take my altcoins, as an outside observer unbiased to whatever else you have going on in your life I think that an anonymous contribution to promote your well being will help you to adjust to the irregularity's that you might find as you go about your daily life, Now send me an address!
(Qrk or BEK)